Posted on June 25, 2018 by Shibusuke

We’re launching the game on August 9 on Steam! Chapter 1 will be available for Windows and Mac for you to experience, and influence, the story of Iskendrun and its inhabitants.

Chapter 1 is big! It’s got five narrative branches, multiple boss fights, tons of quests, rebindable controls (you can play with one hand on a controller!), multiple difficulties, adjustable game speed, adjustable text speed, our Balance of Power story-influencing system - and that’s not even everything. There’s a lot going on!

We’ve been working extra hard to get the game to this point, and there’s still plenty of bug fixing and polish to do between now and release, but we’re really happy with how the game has come together.

In fact, last month we added a frequently requested feature we call “Wait Mode.”

What is Wait Mode?

When we took the game to shows, we’d often get asked if there was a way to pause the game so that it’d be possible to survey what was going on or to issue commands. After a lot of hard work and planning, we found a way!

You can now press the (rebindable!) Wait Mode button and the action will freeze - except you can still navigate the map and issue commands to your characters.

That means it’s possible to pull off simultaneous combos across characters, like this:

Staggering Shot + Combobreaker!

Now, if you want the game to play slower and give you unlimited time to deliberate your next move, the option is there!

Want the game to be faster but to let you pause to issue commands? Done!

Or, you can disable Wait Mode altogether and play the game in its “classic” setup. The choice is yours!

Visible Status Effects

We also made another quality-of-life improvement: the status effects on a given character are now visible in the UI, along with how much time is left on them and how many stacks there are.

Say one of your Brutes is Corrupted - you’ll see a Corruption icon next to their entry in the side UI along with how many stacks (if applicable!) of that status effect they have. The grey countdown circle shows you how much time is left on the effect, too!

That’s a lot of Corruption all at once!

Getting Ready for Launch

Before the rush and excitement of launching the game consumes me entirely, I want to take a moment to cover the Kickstarter rewards we'll be preparing ahead of the August 9 launch.

First, we’ll be preparing the wallpaper(s!) and soundtracks to send out ahead of release. These should arrive digitally before the game releases.

One thing to note about the soundtrack: we still have something up our sleeve, so the soundtracks will be “updated” at a later date… ;)

Once Chapter 1 is out (and I’m able to reclaim some semblance of sanity), we’ll start in on the remaining rewards that don't need to wait on anything anymore, like physical goods. The production journal is an ongoing process (we have to finish the story, after all!), so that's still a ways out, and the remaining design-related rewards will benefit from being able to play the game to inspire ideas

Thank you all for your support and patience over the years. It took longer than we thought it would, and we encountered all sorts of unexpected obstacles in the course of this journey, but we’re now ready to release Chapter 1 to you and get the story of City of the Shroud into your hands - both literally and figuratively!

We are so grateful for your support in getting here; we couldn’t have done it without you. We’ll be back with more announcements before the August 9 launch, so until then, thank you x 1,000,000!